


Every Night My Heart Unfolding

by igrab



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, angels being introspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-12
Updated: 2014-02-12
Packaged: 2018-01-12 01:24:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1180240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/igrab/pseuds/igrab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel likes to read Dean’s soul, the way that other people like to read books.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Night My Heart Unfolding

_So we carry every sadness with us  
Every hour our hearts were broken_

Castiel likes to read Dean’s soul, the way that other people like to read books.

He likes to open up his heart and spread all his secrets out like pages, each one a thin slip of color and emotion and too many things to name. Sometimes he looks at the whole of it, at the moving, breathing, synergy of a human being drawing all these disparate parts into a beautiful whole; sometimes, he picks one, a filament of soul stuff, and reads it closely like a page of dense, fine print. He studies every inch of it, where the connections are, what they mean, how it fits into the big picture, what it stands for on its own.

Tonight, he opens up ‘ _home_ ’. 

This has been a long time coming. In the fabric of Dean’s soul, the word _home_ is a bright knot with strands reaching out to all corners of the tapestry. It has its darker moments—it’s braided in with every doubt and sorrow, wound gently around memories warm with pain—but the knot itself is shining, beautiful. It’s a complicated word, but, Castiel thinks, a good one. Like Dean. Complicated, but good.

He lifts it out and turns it over, pushing apart the strands that connect to things like _Sam_ and _Dad_ and _hunting_ and _motel rooms_. They’re a part of it but not the whole, and Castiel wants to see what’s _inside_ , what this page of the Book of Dean has to say.

There are memories, curled up against each other. One bright with fireworks, another, warm with fire, warm with the heat from a stovetop, warm with the feeling in a heart when someone hugs you without being asked. (Castiel knows how that feels, twice now, and now he knows how to respond. He’ll do it right next time.) There’s a growing wire-frame hope, shiny and brittle, shaped like the bunker but too new to take root just yet. But Dean is hoping, which is news to Castiel, and it makes a smile cross his vessel’s face before he’s even had a chance to realize why. Dean has _hope_. He can’t put into words how that makes him feel.

There’s a small cadre of non-memories, of what-ifs, of things that Dean has collected that embody what home is supposed to be like. The smell of warm apple pie, a pair of happy parents, high school, college, watching movies on weekends and knowing just how to sneak out of the house without waking anybody up. These things aren’t real, so they seem garish, overly bright, but to see them brings Castiel happiness, because their presence here means the light has always conquered the dark. Home still means these saturated, unrealistic clichés, even after all he’s been through, all that’s been taken away from him. He still wants ‘home’ to be synonymous with ‘safety’ and ‘innocence’.

And beneath that, with threads wrapping around the what-ifs and catching at the corners of the wireframe and bumping up against the old memories, Castiel finds something he did not expect. Here, at the heart of this glowing word, he finds an image of himself. His trenchcoat (Jimmy’s, but it’s clear that Dean has not made that distinction in a long time), his crooked tie, the soft beat of wings that meant he’d just appeared (and that, too, has the fragile shimmer of hope, the memory of every time he’d heard that sound). The grit in his stubble in Purgatory. The sharp, bright blue of his eyes. The feel of the scar he’d left upon Dean’s shoulder, the shape of it, the memory of how Dean would hold it when he’d thought Cas dead to ground himself. The touch of his fingertips to his forehead. The rough burr of his voice, so different from Jimmy’s (a distinction he still makes, surprisingly enough, and one that Castiel had not been aware of). The lines at the corner of his eyes when he smiled in another world, another future, when he was still with Dean no matter what. The systematic collection of every time that Castiel came back for him. A feeling, unlike any other that he’d ever seen in Dean’s soul—a feeling of _surety_ , of _belonging_.

He’s opened Dean’s _home_ and found that his most important anchor was the angel who, despite betraying him, despite dying, despite all odds and all circumstances, would never _leave_ him.

And Castiel knows, as he lets Dean’s soul drop back into place and stares through the ceiling up into the unfathomable cosmos, that this is the purpose for which he chooses to exist. It no longer matters why he was made, what he is, what he was destined to be. He chooses the human with the patchwork soul. He chooses the man who could give all he has and still have more. He chooses love, and friendship, he chooses the Winchesters, he chooses Dean. He has had the world, the universe, eternity; but Castiel chooses _home_.


End file.
